I'll just come right out and admit it: I'm becoming more and more of a sucker for spiritual exploration. Call me a cliche of my later 20s...letting go of the perfect girl mentality and wanting to understand deeper questions about what it's all about. Call me a girl from Colorado Springs who felt oppressed by the dominant culture of hard line traditional religions, so waited until later to consider the softer side of spirituality. In any case, I'm here and wondering.
I found The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure by Elizabeth Lesser in my parents' book shelf while home for a visit and was immediately hooked. This substantial book is split into five books: The American Landscape, The Landscape of the Mind, The Landscape of the Heart, The Landscape of the Body, and The Landscape of the Soul. So you can see, Lesser's pretty much got the whole gamut covered.
She's an incredible guide because she's one of the founders of The Omega Institute and has been planning and participating in workshops there for decades. She's been able to sample all sorts of rich traditions, spiritual philosophies, and experiential self-help (don't worry, she talks about the dangers of "spiritual tourism"). The book is, in essence, her philosophy culled from the bits and pieces of all of those experiences, and some original insights of her very own.
I was moved through out the entire book. Lesser is a great story teller and a beautiful writer. There were times when I wished I could have asked her a question, pushed her on her assumptions about the dynamics of the universe, her leaps of faith that still don't sit well with me, but just the fact that I wanted to ask these questions, that I wrestled with the material, seems like the sign of a good book to me.
I like her idea that spirituality is about both "the biggies"--Is there a God? Where do I go after I die? What is I anyway?--and "the dailies"--What is the most ethical way to live? How is my life reflecting my beliefs? What would Jesus do?. I also love her notion of spiritual and political enlightenment being a process of "transcending and including" (it was originally Ken Wilber's from A Brief History of Everything). We must constantly be asking ourselves how our polity and our personhood represents our highest ideals. Do away with the hypocrisy, injustice, inequality and include new ways of being whole, kind, and fair.
There's so much more, but I'll let you seek out the rest...
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I've often wondered why "What happens after we die?" should be considered any kind of big question. We all know what it's like to be dead; we've been dead for billions of years before we were born, and there's no reason to believe it won't be just like that after we die.
Memory is a biological function of the brain; experience takes other, non-biological forms. Non-biological experience that may have occurred before birth leaves no biologcal memory with which to "know" the experience.
It kind of sounds like an Oprah Book Club-book, though.
I tend to think the "dailies" are really the big questions and the so-called "biggies" are not a major factor in my life. Then again, I'm not spiritual at all. I just think the ethics of the day to day are a lot more significant than questions that you can't possibly presume to know answers to...You can have beliefs and theories, you can wax poetic on the subject, but you can't know. It's an interesting topic to muse on from time to time but I don't agonize about what happens after I die. I'll be dead! Besides, what's done will already be done. All you can do is be the best version of yourself possible and the rest should work itself out.
Pat Kibbon: ...experience takes other, non-biological forms.
Not as far as we can tell, no. I think you just made that up.
Alice ... It comes directly out of my head, based on my..........
experience.
Yes, out of your physical, biological head.
In order to meaningfully discuss life after death or life before death it is necessary to refer to "experience". Life before or after death is non-biological, thus, the experience of such life would be non-biological.
Correction:
Please replace all instances of the phrase,"life before dearh" with the phrase, "life before birth"
in my previous post.
thank you